Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 31st May 2011 22:20 UTC, submitted by john

Well, I have to say this: Lodsys got some balls. After Apple threatening them with legal action, Lodsys has gone on the offensive, and has proceeded to sue third party iOS application developers. While Lodsys had first given developers 21 days to negotiate an agreement, due to Apple's legal threats, the company has now moved its litigation timing to an earlier date.

"Otherwise, why spend time and money working on a thing when you release it and your competitors can just leech off of your work?"

Isn't that argument ignoring the majority of software developers currently, and all software developers prior to software patents? We develop software algorithms because it's part of our job - writing code to solve requirements. Employers hire us to address the needs of their paying customers, most of whom don't have the time, resources, or desire to deal with patents. Sometimes we write from scratch, other times we incorporate open source, other times we license commercial code. Sometimes we're inspired by other products, other times we're not. Either way, so what? That's evolution, and it's a good thing for both customers and developers alike.

Unless there's copyright infringement, there's nothing even remotely unethical about creating one's own (possibly better or worse) implementations of the same ideas.

Have you ever thought about why most software developers hate software patents? It's because patents hand over monopoly control of our own code to another party who took no part in it's implementation. We're left paying for something which was of no help to our own development efforts, assuming they don't just shut us down completely.

There's nothing wrong with the way things for work developers without patents. The lawyers hate this scenario far more than we developers do.

I'm not saying that we should let people patent anything and everything for an indeterminate period, just that there are some things that aren't really covered by copyright, that developers should be able to take ownership of for at least a limited amount of time. And if the developer wants to sell his patent to a giant corporation, so be it. It's his/her choice.